Monday, August 25, 2014

The 1964
Democratic National Convention - A Half-Century Later Atlantic City Finds
Itself in a Similar Situation

– By William Kelly

The 1964
Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City – 50 Years Ago, that took place
from August 24-27th, was an historic watershed event for the island resort – a
crossroads that led to the revitalization of the city – and it could be a cautionary
tale as Atlantic City reaches another, similar crossroads, where it must once
again reinvent itself.

That
such a convention could be held on the boardwalk at all was the vision of Nucky
Johnson, who was a driving force behind the construction of the Convention Hall
– now Boardwalk Hall – which opened in 1929, the same year that he was the host
for the first major meeting of mob bosses from around the country.

Nucky Johnson - Had the Boardwalk Hall Built in 1929Some of
them were business partners with Joe Kennedy, Sr., who held major ownership
interests in major Canadian and European whiskey distillers, and didn’t mind
doing business with the bootleggers during prohibition. Kennedy also held
hidden interest in the Cal-Neva Lodge that startled the border between
California and Nevada, with a casino on the Nevada side, which was purchased by
Giancana and Sinatra, who brought in Atlantic City’s Skinny D’Amato as the
manager.

In 1960
Joe Kennedy touched base once again with Sam Giancana, the mob boss who
controlled the rackets in Chicago, Las Vegas and California, and got him to
support his son Jack’s 1960 bid to be elected president of the United States.

Giancana’s
good friends Frank Sinatra and Skinny D’Amato were quick to oblige, Sinatra
contributing the campaign theme song “High Hopes,” and he introduced JFK to
Judith Campbell Exner, who served as a mistress and courier between Kennedy
and Giancana.

Skinny
D’Amato and Camden attorney Angelo Malandra took suitcases full of cash to West
Virginia that was liberally distributed to Skinny’s friends in the West
Virginia Sheriff’s Association, who counted the votes and often visited his 500
Club when they had their annual convention in Atlantic City.

One of
Kennedy’s last hurdles to being nominated as the Democratic candidate at the
1960 Convention in Los Angeles was the West Virginia primary, where the Irish
Catholic Kennedy was up against Hubert Humphrey, a protestant, so that became
the major issue of the primary, which Kennedy won and dispelling that as an
issue.

Skinny D'Amato and JFK during the 1960 Campaign

A couple
of major decisions were made at the 1960 Democratic National Convention in Los
Angeles, including the addition of Lyndon Baines Johnson to the ticket as the
Vice Presidential candidate, said to be done on the advice of Joe Kennedy, and
naming Atlantic City as the site of the 1964 Democratic Convention, which some
said was a payback to D’Amato and Sinatra for their support during the
primaries.

Actually
H. Hap Farley was the primary mover behind bringing the 1964 Democratic
Convention to Atlantic City. As the political boss who took over after Nucky
Johnson went to prison, Farley is best known for having the Atlantic City
Expressway built, but he also lobbied extensively to bring both the Republican
and Democratic Conventions to the boardwalk, but succeeded, despite being a
staunch Republican, of only enticing the Democrats.

After
winning the nomination and then the election, President Kennedy asked Sinatra
to arrange for the entertainment for the Inaugural Balls, which he did, and
Sinatra was looking forward to organizing a similar party for Kennedy in
Atlantic City when Kennedy would be renominated for his second term at the 1964
Convention.

But then
things went terribly wrong.

Kennedy
appointed his younger brother Robert F. Kennedy as Attorney General and RFK
targeted the mob bosses as part of a war against organized crime, and he
singled out Sam Giancana, New Orleans don Carlos Marcello and Santo Traficante,
of Tampa, Florida, despite their assistance in getting JFK elected and working
closely with the CIA in trying to assassinate Cuban dictator Fidel Castro.

When J.
Edgar Hover, the head of the FBI told RFK the attorney general that his brother
the president was receiving phone calls and visits at the White House from Judy
Campbell Exner, the mob moll who was also in bed with both Sinatra and
Giancana, the president cut off his contacts with Giancana and began to
distance himself from both Exner and Sinatra.

Then,
rather than Castro being assassinated, JFK was shot and killed while riding in
an open car through the streets of Dallas, and instead of JFK being renominated
for a second term, LBJ was the president who was nominated to be the Democratic
candidate at the 1964 convention on the boardwalk in Atlantic City.

Protesters On the Boardwalk outside Convention Hall during the Convention After
the resolution of who would represent the racially divided Mississippi
delegation, the three biggest questions going into Atlantic City in August 1964
were who would be the Vice Presidential nominee, what was the still unreleased
Warren Report on the assassination of President Kennedy going to say, and what
was Robert Kennedy going to do?

No one
knew who the Vice Presidential nominee would be until LBJ invited liberal Minnesota
Senator Hubert Humphrey to accompany him on the flight to Atlantic City.
Humphrey, who Kennedy defeated in the West Virginia primary, had presidential
ambitions himself, but would do LBJ’s bidding, and sold his soul to resolve the
Mississippi issue.

As for
the Warren Commission Report, LBJ knew what was ready to go to press, and that
it would conclude that JFK was killed by Lee Harvey Oswald, a deranged loner,
and there was no conspiracy, so that only left one big question – what was RFK
going to do?

LBJ
later said that from the moment JFK was murdered, he felt that RFK didn’t think
he deserved to be president, and Johnson considered the possibility that RFK
would try to lead a revolt at the Convention and attempt to hijack the
nomination from him. If the convention atmosphere presented the opportunity,
RFK’s name could have been introduced, and if LBJ didn’t win on the first
ballet, anything could happen.

In order
to avert this possibility, President Johnson took some unprecedented steps. As
Kennedy family historian Arthur Schlesinger wrote, “The tribute to the fallen
President was originally scheduled for Tuesday night. Johnson had it moved back
to Thursday, by which time the nomination would be completed. He took other
precautions, the most extraordinary of which was to send Cartha DeLoach and and
FBI team of thirty snoops and wire tappers to Atlantic City. The ostensible
purpose was to gather intelligence ‘concerning matters of strife, violence,
etc. The real purpose, according to William Sullivan of the FBI, was to gather
political information useful to President Johnson, particularly bottling up
Robert Kennedy – that is reporting on the activities of Robert Kennedy.”

LBJ also
thought that Robert Kennedy would try to wire tap his boardwalk hotel room, so
he secretly moved to a more secure location – the nearby Margate beach house of
Carroll Rosenbloom, the owner of the Baltimore Colts football team. Rosenbloom, a gambler, was partners with Mike McLaney in the purchase of the Hotel Nacional casino in Havana from Meyer Lansky a few months before Castro took over, and they lost their investment. Rosenbloom hoped, with LBJ in the White House, he might get his hotel and casino back, but knowing what happened to his predecessor, LBJ didn't want to have anything to do with Cuba or Castro. LBJ was confident that at he was more secure at Rosenbloom's house than anywhere on Absecon Island, and the amenities were better. As for Atlantic City's image, the convention backfired as the thousands of delegates and media reporters from around the world complained of the shoddy accommodations as the boardwalk hotels that were first class facilities in the 1920s and 30s were now run down, so the plumbing and electricity didn't always work and the media reports gave the resort a black eye that hurt until casino gambling legislation was approved over a decade later. Convention Hall however, had been upgraded and was air conditioned and comfortable when the climax of the proceedings finally came on the last day of the convention.

When RFK
joined his family and the other dignitaries on stage, Jackie Kennedy handed him a note.

As
Schlesinger relates, “Finally Senator Henry Jackson, who was presiding,
motioned him (RFK) to the rostrum. When Scoop introduced him, it hit, I mean it
really hit, it just went on and on. I stood on the floor in the midst of the
thunderous ovation. I had never seen anything like it. Ordinarily an organ in
the background controls the pandemonium of a convention. This time they stopped
the organ after a moment or so. But the demonstration roared on, reaching a new
intensity every time that Robert Kennedy, standing with a wistful half-smile on
his face, tried to bring it to an end. As Kennedy once more raised his hand to
still the uproar, Jackson whispered to him, ‘Let it go on, just let them do it
Bob, let them get it out of their system.’ He repressed his tears. Many of the
audience did not. He seemed slight, almost frail, as the crowd screamed itself
hoarse. It went on for twenty-two minutes. Finally he began to speak. At the
end, the quotation: ‘When he shall die, take him and cut him out in little
stars, and he will make the face of heaven so fine, that all the world will be
in love with night, and pay no worship to the garish sun.’”

These
words, from Romeo and Juliet, were handed to him by Jackie, and preceded a
short film about the life of John F. Kennedy, who would have certainly been
renominated for a second term if fate and destiny did not intervene.

To
commemorate the occasion, the city of Atlantic City named the plaza in front of
the hall “Kennedy Plaza,” and a bust of JFK by renown sculpture Evangelos
Frudakis was unveiled, a bust that is now partially hidden behind a stage where
summer concerts are held.

Though
young people today know Kennedy Plaza as the scene of free concerts and a
nightly lightshow, the statute that stands there remains the last vestige of
another era and a reminder of what might have been if Kennedy had lived to
serve a second term.

William
Kelly is a freelance writer and regional historian from Browns Mills, N.J. He
can be reached at Billkelly3@gmail.com

Thursday, August 21, 2014

In regards to Jim Garrison requesting his son to
be at the National Archives when the government finally gets around to
releasing the still secret records on the assassination, I tried to discover
what records remain sealed, but there are so many they can’t tell us how many
there are.

I did learn however, that most of the documents
that Garrison specifically referred to have already been released, and what
remains withheld should be released to the public in late September 2017,
unless the President orders otherwise.

In 1996 Garby F. Leon asked the NARA about the
status of these records and intimidated that he was going to mention them
during a Assassinations Records Review Board (ARRB) hearing, but he is not
listed among those who testified at the public hearings, but he did correspond
with them. [ARRB files ]

Besides having a unique name, Garby Leon was an
interesting person, with a doctorate in music from Harvard, he was a Fox film
producer whose helped develop the Matrix, and recently passed away [obit ].

Many thanks to Rex Bradford at MaryFerrell.org
for making these documents and other significant records available, and I have
added the relevant links.

JIM GARRISON'S LIST OF WARREN COMMISSION DOCUMENTS
WHICH HE SOUGHT AND WAS UNABLE TO OBTAIN:

On April 9, 1996 Martha Murphy of the NARA responded
to the inquiry from Garby Leon and wrote:

“This is in response to your e-mailed request
for information regarding

the status of Warren Commission Documents. The income
tax forms of Ruth and Michael Paine CD 713 and CD 848 have been withheld for
privacy and are referred to the Internal Revenue Service for review. These
documents are not security classified, as would be suggested by the description
of them as ‘secret’ in the book ‘On the Trail of the Assassins.’”

Garby Leon commented: “But they're fudging a
bit, because the Paine's tax information, are also 'referred' to the IRS, hence
unavailable. I was amused at how testy
the archivist's response was to my quote from Garrison...”

And I agree, whether they are being withheld for
reasons of national security or personal privacy reasons, they are sealed from
the public and are therefore still ‘secret.’

CD 384 “ACCESS RESTRICTED – The item identified
below has been withdrawn from this file: File Designation CD 384...In the
review of this file this item was removed because access to it is restricted.
Restrictions on records in the National Archives are stated in general and
specific record group restriction statements which are available for
examination. The item identification above has been withdrawn because it
contains: X Security – Classified Information

Garb Leon: “In sum, 15 of the 51 Warren
Commission items which Garrison wanted to see are still secret, or redacted.
That's roughly 30% secrecy maintained, a third of a century later. A question I
have: has the ARRB reviewed the 'redactions' these documents are 'released'
with? Finally, if I have the opportunity, I intend to ask the ARRB board
members if Garrison's wish-list will be fulfilled - or not. This would seem
only the very most basic starting point for the release of government
documents, pursuant to the ARRB's mandate.
And, a good benchmark for testing how good the USG's word is on their
promise to fulfill the intent of the law.”

October 24, 2017 –it’s a Tuesday. Mark it on your
calendar – as that’s the day that one of two things will happen.

Either the AOTUS – Archivist of the United States
will announce to the President, Congress and the American people that the last
government record on the assassination of President Kennedy has been released
to the public or the POTUS – the President of the United States – whoever is
elected in the next election, will announce that he/she has agreed with the
requests by agencies of government and will continue to withhold certain
records for reasons of national security.

Friday, August 8, 2014

When it
was suggested that a conference be held in New Orleans on the 2017 anniversary
of the Garrison investigation into the New Orleans aspects of the assassination,
I thought New Orleans a great place to hold a conference, as I look forward to
visiting all of the French Quarter bars that are mentioned in Garrison’s book
“On the Trail of the Assassins,” some of which are featured in Oliver Stone’s JFK
movie, which is based in part on that book.

There’s Tortorich’s
on Royal Street, where Garrison watched the breaking news of the assassination
on TV, the Katzenjammer Bar on Camp Street where Guy Bannister and Jack Martin
got drunk at the same time, the Bourbon House at Bourbon and St. Peter Streets
where Barbara Reid sat down with ex-marine buddies Kerry Thornley and Lee
Oswald over burgers and beers, Ryder’s Coffee House at Vieux Carre where
Thornley hung out, Broussard’s Restaurant where Garrison had lunch with Dean
Andrews, Lafitte’s Blacksmith Shop where Garrison investigated the background
of “Clem Bertrand,” Cosimo’s on Burgandy Street where “Bertrnad” was identified
as Clay Shaw, the Masquerade Bar on St. Louis Street where Shaw was known by
the “Bertram” alias, and the Absinthe House, where Shaw and David Ferrie were
seen together. I was in New Orleans when Stone was filming JFK and visited some
of these haunts, but the Habana Bar, where Oswald was also known to drink
lemonade with the Cubans, is no longer there.

The
suggested date of a New Orleans conference – 2017, I noted, is also when,
according to the JFK Act of 1992, the still-sealed government records on the
assassination are scheduled to be released, and I recalled Garrison saying he
asked his son to be there when the secret records are released.

In
response, Don Carpenter wrote: “Bill, Just to add a little context, Garrison
died in Fall of 1992, before ARRB even began to crank up its very basic
operations. Garrison may have made the statement about all the still-sealed
documents as of 1992, or probably years before when he made the statement
(probably in the 1967-69 period), but most of whatever he was talking about has
already been released. He was not talking specifically about what is left to be
declassified, although I think we all are anxious to see if there is anything
in there.”

Carpenter
also said that he didn’t think “Garrison was on to something,” though he is
willing to be persuaded otherwise.

Well I
don’t think that the New Orleans crew that Garrison “was on to” – the same
Yahoos who carried out the Houma Bunker raid [ http://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/2009/05/houma-bunker-raid-revisted.html],
could have successfully pulled off the relatively complex Dealey Plaza covert operation,
which included the framing of Oswald, a professional Level One sniper taking
the head shot, a Northwoods-type disinformation twist to blame Castro and the
officially sanctioned cover-up that continues today. That’s a very
sophisticated operation, one well planned out in advance and not one that some
New Orleans Yahoos or the Mafia could have successfully pulled off. The Dealey
Plaza operation was successfully conducted by a domestic anti-Communist
intelligence network closely affiliated with the military-industrial complex that
continues to function today.

And I
think that what Garrison was “on to,” wasn’t the Bannister, Ferrie, Clay Shaw
and the Yahoos, but rather Garrison eventually realized was that Kennedy wasn’t
killed by a deranged lone nut, or even by the New Orleans contingent he tried
to prosecute – but what happened at Dealey Plaza was a covert coup conducted by
JFK’s rich and powerful enemies in Washington who were beyond his jurisdiction.

You can
argue over whether Garrison was “on to something” or not, but what he says
rings true –

“More
than anything,” Garrison wrote, “what has changed in the years since President
Kennedy’s assassination is our national consciousness. We have been through so
much. There were, for example, the assassinations of Medgar Evers, MLK, RFK and
Malcolm X. There were assassination attempts on presidential candidate George
Wallace and presidents Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan. We lived through nine horrifying
years of the Vietnam War, the trauma of Watergate, the revelations during the
1970s about the CIA, and more recently the Iran/contra affair. This
extraordinary succession of events has ended our innocence. Looking back today
with new information and new insights, it is possible to put together an
informed historical speculation of what happened to President Kennedy and why.
I believe that what happened at Dealey Plaza in Dallas on November 22, 1963 was
a coup d’etat. I believe that it was instigated and planned long in advance by
fanatical anticommunists in the U.S. intelligence community, that it was
carried out, most likely without official approval, by individuals in the
C.I.A.’s covert operations apparatus and other extra-governmental
collaborators, and covered up by like-minded individuals in the F.B.I., the
Secret Service, the Dallas Police Department, and the military, and that its
purpose was to stop Kennedy from seeking détente with the Soviet Union and Cuba
and ending the Cold War.”

“This
coup d‘etat had accomplished its objective with clock-work precision. The life
had been ripped from the chief executive of the United States government, and
major changes in American foreign policy would be arriving not in months or
weeks, but in the next several days. Meanwhile, the cover-up was progressing…As
soon as the non-participating elements in the intelligence community saw that a
coup d’etat had occurred, they moved quickly to support the official story.
Motivated in some instances by self-preservation and in others by a belief that
Kennedy had brought the assassination on
himself by compromising too often with the Soviets, the remainder of the
government – from high elected officials to heads of departments and agencies –
lined up to add their solemn voices to the growing chorus chanting the great
lie.”

“With
the murder plainly unsolved, a succession of Presidents and attorneys general,
each with the resources of the F.B.I. and the entire federal government at
their command, made no effort to get to the truth. …dissemination of
disinformation is the last element necessary for a successful coup d’etat, and
it also happens to be one of the specialties of the C.I.A. For many years the
Agency secretly had on its payroll journalists ostensibly working for the major
media but in fact disseminating propaganda for consumption by the American
people…”

“The
original false sponsor was the scapegoat himself, Lee Harvey Oswald…formally
endorsed by the Warren Commission…However, over time it became increasingly
apparent that the lone assassin fairy tale had fallen apart, and most of its
supporters simply fell silent…One of the most intriguing false sponsors is
Fidel Castro…Of course, the primary and most lasting false sponsor has been
organized crime, the Mafia, the mob….Upon close examination,…the false sponsors
all fall of their own weight. What remains as the only likely sponsor with both
the motive and the capability of murdering the President is the covert action
arm of the Central Intelligence Agency. Invisible as it is dangerous, the
covert operations apparatus of the C.I.A. has become the most powerful element
in the intelligence community….Is all of this possible? It might not have
seemed so 25 years ago. However, now that we know some of the true history of
the C.I.A. and its covert operations, the answer is a distinct yes.
Assassination is precisely what the Agency knows how to do and what it has done
all over the world for policy ends.”

“With
the passage of time, we can see the enduring results of President Kennedy’s
assassination…The Justice Department, knowing all that we know now, still refuses
to conduct an honest investigation intot he most important political
assassination of our time….It may be too late. However it is not too late for
us to learn the lessons of history, to understand where we are now and who runs
this country…”

From “On the Trail of the Assassins” (Chapter
20, The Secret Sponsors, p. 320-347)

While I
disagree with Garrison in that the C.I.A.’s covert operational branch was the
only intelligence network capable of such covert operations – the military is
also proficient at such tactics, recognizing the assassination as a coup d’etat
and the Modus Operandi of the murder as that of a covert intelligence operation
are significant steps in figuring out what really happened and determining the
truth.

And what
Garrison says about the sealed government files is pertinent and significant, and
I quickly found the correct quote thanks to Dave Reitzes, who also thought
important enough to quote and try to denigrate when wrote “The JFK 100 – Suppressed
Investigative Files” http://www.jfk-online.com/jfk100files.html, where he refers to the part of Oliver
Stone’s JFK film where Garrison mentions the secret files. Reitzes specifically
quotes the part I was referring to when New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison
(Kevin Costner) delivers a monologue about evidence being concealed by the
federal government:

“Let’s
ask the two men who have profited the most from the assassination – your former
President Lyndon Baines Johnson and your new President, Richard Nixon – to
release 51 CIA documents pertaining to Lee Oswald and Jack Ruby, or the secret
CIA memo on Oswald’s activities in Russia that was ‘destroyed’ while being
photocopied. All these documents are yours – the people’s property – you pay
for it, because the government considers you children who might be too
disturbed to face this reality, because you might lynch those involved, you
cannot see these documents for another 75 years. I’m in my 40s, so I’ll have shuffled off this moral coil by
then, telling my 8-year old son to keep himself physically fit so that one
glorious September morning in 2038 he can walk into the National Archives and
find out what the CIA and FBI knew. They may even push it back then. It may
become a generational affair with questions passed down from father to son,
mother to daughter, in the manner of the ancient runic bards. Someday,
somewhere, someone might find out the damned Truth. Or we might just build
ourselves a new Government like the Declaration of Independence says we should
do when the old one ain’t working....” (1)
Oliver Stone and Zachary Sklar, JFK:
The Book of the Film (New York, Applause, 1992), p. 178.

Rather
than pushing the release date back, as Garrison surmises, public pressure generated
by Stone’s filim made them move it forward, so the 75 years the Warren Commission
records were sealed, and the 50 years the HSCA records were sealed, have been superseded
by the JFK Act of 1992 that stipulates all the records be released by 2017 – or
withheld only by an order from the president, whoever she may be.

So
Garrison’s son doesn’t have to wait as long as Big Jim thought.

And I
like Garrison’s suggestion that we ask the President to release the still
secret records, something Obama can easily do with a simple Executive Order.

In his
article Reitzes asks, “Has the government really been withholding evidence of
conspiracy?”

And the
answer clearly is yes, even if one sticks only to the Warren Commission era
records Garrison was talking about – and I will only mention three – the
document that the Warren Commission lawyer was reading when he was recorded as
saying: “We’ll have to find out what Oswald studied at the Monterey Institute” (now
the Defense Language Institute), and the ONI and USMC investigative records and
reports, but there are others.

Reitzes is
a one-time Conspiracy Theorist who is now a Lone Nutter, and like many religious
converts, he is a true believer who quotes Gus Russo and John McAdams. And I take exception to John McAdams’
statements about Garrison, specifically the comparison of Garrison’s reference
to “51 CIA documents pertaining to Oswald and Jack Ruby” and Joe McCarthy’s bogus
communists in the State Department, as McCarthy’s number was made up and the
communists boogey men didn’t really exist, while the secret records Garrison
refers to do exist, and in fact he lists some of them. Rather than Joe
McCarthy, Garrison’s role in the Kennedy assassination is more comparable to
the cases of Sacco and Vanzetti or the Dreyfus Affair, in which the truth
eventually emerges over time, as it is with the assassination of President
Kennedy.

Reitzes
also quotes McAdams’ examples of the NARA declassification of other government
records, specifically those of the Fish and Game Commission, but I wonder if
Reitzes, McAdams or any JFK researcher has investigated the presence of Texas
Fish and Game officers in the Texas School Book Depository within minutes of
the assassination, and whether or not any of them testified or wrote reports of
what they were doing and what they discovered there?

SOMETHING
FISHY IN THE FILES

As for
Garrison’s references to the secret records, in his books Heritage of Stone and On the
Trail of the Assassins (p. 54-55), Garrison lists a series of Warren
Commission documents that were still sealed away from public view when he wrote
those books, including:

Garrison
also writes (On the Trail of the
Assassins, p. 72) that, “As a routine matter, I wanted to examine the
income tax records of Ruth and Michael Paine, but I was told that they had been
classified secret. In addition to the Paine’s income tax reports, Commission
documents 212, relating to Ruth Paine, and 218, relating to Michael Paine, also
had been classified as secret on the grounds of national security. Classified
for the same reason were Commission documents 258, relating to Michael, and
508, relating to Michael Paine’s sister, as well as Commission documents 600
through 629, regarding relatives of Michael Paine. What was so special about
this particular family that made the federal government so protective of it?”

“This
provocative listing,” Garrison wrote, “made it appear more to me than ever that
something was fishy. Next I decided to focus on Oswald’s movements immediately
after he left the Marines.”

Now I’m
pretty sure some of these “secret” records have been released under the JFK
Act, and will check with Mary Ferrell Archives and NARA to see if they are now
available, but I too am interested in focusing on Oswald’s movements
immediately after the assassination, which I will get to.

But
first, it should be noted that Reitzes falsely answers his question “Has the
government really been withholding evidence of conspiracy?” by quoting longtime
researcher and JFK movie consultant Gus Russo, who says that the film he
consulted on is “misleading,” and Russo has since been exposed as a witting CIA
asset who continues to promote the discredited original operational cover story
that Castro was behind the assassination.

Reitzes
quotes Russo as saying that when he heard Stone talk about “the sinister
sealing of the Warren Commission records for seventy-five years. I was stunned.
Although that had been President Johnson’s original intention, public pressure
had actually forced the release of most of the Commission’s records within
three years of the 1963 murder.”

Actually,
it wasn’t public pressure – like that generated by Stone’s film that resulted
in the JFK Act, but many of the Warren Commission records were released because
of the single letter from Cedar Rapids, Iowa mayor Johnson that led to the
reversal of the seventy-five year policy.

Russo
relates in his book http://www.mtgriffith.com/web_documents/russo.htm, how he “managed to pull Stone aside,
and informed him that the records we investigators really coveted were the
HSCA’s sealed files, numbering hundreds of thousands of pages, as well as those
of other federal agencies whose holdings could be in the millions of pages….”

I was
among those infuriated when HSCA chief counsel G. Robert Blakey declared the
committee records “Congressional records,” which sealed them for fifty years
and since Congress exempted itself from the FOIA Act, kept them from the
public. Blakey did this while saying, “I’ll rest on the judgment of historians
in fifty years.”

Indeed,
“we investigators” weren’t going to rest on the judgment of historians in fifty
years, and particularly coveted the House Select Committee (HSCA) records, and devised
congressional legislation specifically to get the HSCA records exempted from
the congressional rule that mandated all congressional records be sealed for
fifty years.

When I
asked Marion Johnson, the NARA archivist then responsible for the JFK
assassination records, - why fifty years? Why not thirty five or seventy
years?, Johnson replied “that is the estimated amount of time the people
mentioned in the documents would be dead.”

So they
time the release of these documents so that the people mentioned in them are
dead and can’t be questioned.

But under
public pressure sparked by the release of the JFK movie, which mentions the
secret and sealed records at the end of the film, Congress passed a law that released
not only the House Committee records we asked for, but all government records
related to the assassination, which is much more than we had requested. That was
still limiting though, as the HSCA MLK records remain sealed to this day.

But yes,
we investigators coveted the HSCA records more than the Warren Commission
documents, most of which have been released, but those that are still withheld
are among the most sacred secret records that are still threatening to our
national security today, over fifty years after the assassination.

Russo says
that he conferred with respected Washington investigator, the late Kevin Walsh,
who gave him a letter that “corroborated” what Russo had been saying, a letter Russo
hand delivered to Stone – but not shared with us. And it is a shame on Russo
that we can’t take his word for it.

BK
Notes: Is Kevin Walsh’s letter to Oliver Stone about the still secret
assassination records on the public record and available today? Someone sent me
scans of dozens of letters written by Walsh, and I will check to see if that
one is among them, but I don’t think it is.

And to
show why the HSCA records are more valuable than the Warren Commission records
I refer to the one HSCA document that I am working on at the moment, a once
sealed document that indicates Lee Oswald, USMC flew to Europe on a Military
Air Transport flight out of McGuire Air Force Base NJ in on his way to defect
to the Soviet Union in October 1959, which contradicts the official version of
events that he took a tramp steamer.

But
incredibly enough, the records of that flight may still exist, and two of the
people mentioned in the official congressional report may still be alive to
confirm this story, over fifty years after it occurred.

In any
case, the HSCA records are much more valuable than the Warren Commission
records and the still secret Church Committee documents are probably even more
enlightening, but we have to wait until 2017 to see them, and as Garrison says,
when 2017 rolls around, their release may be pushed back even further by the
sitting president.

Reitzes also
quotes Michael R. McReynolds, of the NARA Textual Reference Division, who said that
as of 1992, 98 percent of the Warren Commission records had been released.

Of
course the 98 percent of the Warren Commission records released so far don’t
include the Monterey Language Institute document or the ONI and USMC
investigative reports we seek, and they are now saying the same thing about all
of the government records released under the JFK Act - millions of them - 98
percent of all government records on the assassination are now in the public
domain, but they don’t tell you that there are so many documents still being
withheld that they can’t tell us how many there are.

“Since
that time, of course,” Reitzes falsely writes, “some may have noticed that
Oliver Stone hasn’t said a word about those files. That’s because they prove his JFK monologue to be little more than hot
air, there were no documents withheld because they were ‘smoking guns’ proving
the existence of a conspiracy.”

If
Garrison’s monologue is little more than hot air, then Reitzes’ is hog’s breath,
and only proves that he hasn’t bothered to read the documents released so far.
Of course Stone has talked about those files – he testified before Congress about
them [ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddlSwJ3uuuM
] and continues to talk about them [See: Stone at Wecht Conference]. Stone said
he didn’t expect any “smoking gun” documents to be found, but instead thought
that the existing records would be like the frame of a Mercedes Benz left on a
street in Harlem for thirty years, stripped of all its value, which is exactly
what we found.

And even
though Reitzes is unaware of them, there certainly are “smoking” documents
among the secret and once-sealed records that support, if not prove the fact
there were criminal conspiracies committed – such as ONI Director Rufus
Taylor’s November 27th memo.

It confirms that the military was
giving support to the CIA Cuban operations and that they were conducting a
Valkyrie type plot aimed at Castro – one based on the German generals’ plan to
kill Hitler, the specific operation that I believe was diverted to Dealey
Plaza.

Where
there’s smoke there’s fire, not fish, and if they’ve released such smoking
documents already, you can be sure the records still being withheld for reasons
of national security will certainly threaten the very nature of the state.

As for
Don Carpenter saying “we’re all anxious to see what’s there,” well we pretty much
know what’s there, as we have all of the denials of requests for documents –
such as the ONI Defector file, the documents on Ruth and Michael Paine, Collins
Radio, Air Force One and not dozens, but hundreds of similar records that have
been denied researchers since the passage of the JFK Act.

So now I’m
going to try to take Garrison’s advice and try to stay healthy so in late September
2017 I can stand with his son and if the president will let us, we will finally
get to read some of the records that the government refuses to let us see today.

William
Kelly is a freelance writer and historian, author of “300 Years at the Point”
and “Birth of the Birdie,” co-founder of the Committee for an Open Archives
(COA) and an original member of COPA – the Coalition On Political Assassinations
[COPA | Coalition on Political Assassinations]. He can be reached at Billkelly3@gmail.com.